Pain that fluctuates, tenderness, burning muscular pain with sleep disturbance or chronic fatigue and acute morning stiffness. Such is the daily struggle facing an individual suffering from fibromyalgia. An exhausting struggle, leaving the victim at a loss, feeling misunderstood and helpless, unable to lead the same life “as before”, having aged 20 years overnight. A gruelling struggle, compounded by the doctors’ lack of knowledge, sometimes going as far as the very negation of the illness, which causes matrimonial break-up (75% of cases), loneliness, accepting one’s suffering with resignation.

Fibromyalgia is a musculoskeletal chronic disease affecting almost 500,000 Canadians an 10 times more Americans. The symptoms are fatigue, insomnia, non-restorative sleep and muscular pain. There is an agreement among numerous medical authorities regarding 18 painful areas on the body; muscles and tendons of the shoulders, the neck, between the shoulder blades, the low back, the sciatic nerve, the knees, the elbows, the wrists and the thorax. If eleven of these signs are persistent, a person is diagnosed as suffering from fibromyalgia.

Between 40 and 70% of sufferers have related health problems: constipation, diarrhea, nausea, abdominal gas and pain, bad migraines, palpitations, dizziness and restlessness. The symptoms are worse under peculiar conditions such as weather changes, cold, wind, humidity, as well as hormone imbalance in women, stress and depression.